Home » Posts tagged "The Last Werewolf"

MonsterLibrarian.com’s Top Picks for 2011- Adult Books

Well, we’re not churning out 5,000 reviews a year like Kirkus Reviews, but our volunteer reviewers worked hard in 2011, reading and reviewing close to 300 books- some good, some bad, and some that were really extraordinary pieces of writing and storytelling.

With a new year beginning, it’s time for the Monster Librarian, in consultation with contributing reviewers, to reflect back on the past year’s reading and reviewing. We didn’t get out a list of the top picks for 2010, but now we’re back now, with our Top Picks for 2011. Each book on the list below was reviewed in the past year, although not all the books were published in 2011. If the book made a Top Picks list in the past, it won’t be on this year’s list (Wintergirls, by Laurie Halse Anderson, was first reviewed in 2009 and made the list that year, so it’s not on this year’s list).

Books that made this list were chosen by our reviewers as exceptional examples of compelling writing, creativity, and original illustration or presentation. Many of them provided considerable food for thought as well as entertainment value. The choices were made only from books reviewed for the site, so there are many fine titles that do not appear here. The Monster Librarian’s Top Picks for 2011, listed below, have not been ranked in any order. You’ll find a list for each age group: Adult, Young Adult, and Kids. Below you’ll find our list of Top Picks for Adult Fiction in 2011. I’ll post the lists for young adult and children’s books shortly.

Note for librarians and readers: As with all recommended reading lists, not all of The Monster Librarian’s Top Picks for 2011 will be appropriate for or appreciated by every reader. Please take the time to check out reviews of these titles at MonsterLibrarian.com before making a decision about reading them or recommending them to others.

 

The Monster Librarian’s Top Picks for 2011

 

Titles for Adults


A special mention goes to Lisa Morton’s The Samhanach, which three of our reviewers independently chose to review. All three reviewers highly recommended this book. And now, the list.

 

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombie Jim, by Mark Twain and W. Bill Czolgosz

Allison Hewitt Is Trapped: A Zombie Novel, by Madeleine Roux

Bedbugs, by Ben H. Winter

Bigfoot War 2: Dead in the Woods, by Eric S. Brown

Bone Marrow Stew, by Tim Curran (limited edition available only from Tasmaniac Publications)

Crucified Dreams, edited by Joe R. Lansdale

Cuckoo, by Richard Wright

Dust, by Joan Frances Turner

Draculas: A Novel of Terror, by Blake Crouch, Jack Kilborn, Jeff Strand, and F. Paul Wilson

Enclave, by Ann Aguirre

Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror, by Lorne Dixon

Ghost Story: A Novel of the Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher

Graveminder, by Melissa Marr

How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf, by Molly Harper

In Extremis: The Most Extreme Short Stories of John Shirley, by John Shirley

Our Lady of The Shadows, by Tony Richards

Smile No More, by James A. Moore

Sympathy for the Devil, by Justin Gustainis

That Which Should Not Be, by Brett J. Talley

The Anatomy of Evil, by Dr. Michael Stone

The Last Werewolf, by Glen Duncan

The Night Strangers, by Chris Bohjalian

The Pumpkin Man, by John Everson

The Reapers Are the Angels, by Alden Bell

The Samhanach, by Lisa Morton

The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities: Exhibits, Oddities, Images, and Stories from Top Authors and Artists, edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer

Wormfood, by Jeff Jacobson

Zombie, Ohio: A Tale of the Undead, by Scott Kenemore

Zone One, by Colson Whitehead

 

Stay tuned for part two of our Top Picks for 2011!

The H-Word. Part 3

And now… The tipping point for me. The article that made me want to shake somebody at the Wall Street Journal. Did you know this summer is…

 

THE SEASON OF THE SUPERNATURAL!

 

Yep.  “Real” authors are now coming out of the closet. The genre fiction my creative writing professor, Clint McCown, banned us from writing in his class because it wasn’t “real” or “literary” is suddenly okay.  Except, wait! Let’s not call it horror fiction when literary writer Glen Duncan writes about a werewolf with “a lusty appetite for human flesh”.  Nope- it’s “a high concept literary novel.”  It just HAPPENS to have a man-eating werewolf as the narrator.  Hmm… How can the literary establishment avoid the stigma of writing genre books? Certainly, those books, populated with werewolves, zombies, ghosts, and vampires, couldn’t possibly be horror fiction. Of course not. It’s “supernatural literary fiction”. I’d like to thank Glen Duncan’s publicist for taking the time to offer us here at MonsterLibrarian.com, a horror fiction review site, a review copy of The Last Werewolf.

The Wall Street Journal did briefly acknowledge the horror genre, but none of the books in this article were mentioned as part of the horror genre. And, while I understand that different imprints have different audiences, I was appalled at Knopf’s attitude that “we don’t do those kinds of books”.  It’s so disrespectful to readers’ preferences, and readers are the lifeblood of any publishing house.  The author of the Journal’s article tried to justify the popularity of these titles by counting Homer, Shakespeare, Dante and Milton as writers in the literary tradition who tossed gods, monsters, and the undead into the mix, but those guys cared about telling a story, not whether it was “literary”.

And that’s why my five year old is begging me to tell him about Odysseus and the Cyclops for the billionth time, and preparing for the zombie apocalypse (in spite of my attempts to protect him from all things zombie). The stories and the monsters are just that good. There’s no reason to be afraid of the H-word. There are a LOT of good storytellers out there. Even if they write “those books”, that’s no reason to write them off, or treat their readers with contempt.

Look, the horror community is not as organized as the romance community. RWA has hard data on sales and on who their readers are.  Writers in the horror genre don’t. And it would be hard to collect… are there ANY major publishers who publish horror since Leisure went by the wayside? But horror readers, writers, and books are here, and it’s foolish for publishers, mainstream authors, and book critics to write them off.  Horror fiction. Not “paranormal”, not “supernatural”, not, “thriller”, “science fiction”, “fantasy”, “dystopian” or “lowbrow”.(although it can be any of those things as well). It’s okay to read and write horror fiction with pride. No one should have to defend that choice.

No matter what anyone else doesn’t say.